Web Marketing

Marketing on the Internet is an ever-changing business. Montecito Media has been active in online marketing since the beginning. We have run successful campaigns for all types of businesses, including financial institutions, doctors, retailers, and many more. Following is a brief description of our marketing services.

Search Engine Optimizing: Search engines are the main source of traffic (visitors) on the Internet today. Pages are ranked at search engines by a complex combination of factors individual to each search engine. With millions of pages competing for each keyword or keyword phrase, achieving a top ranking is both an art and a science.

Optimizing a website entails customizing each page to achieve a ranking on the first result page. Listing on result pages other than the first one are almost worthless. Say you sell bicycles. You would love to have the keyword “bicycles” at any search engine, but so would the millions of competitors you are going up against. The keyword “bicycles” would bring tens of thousands customers to your site each month. But, again, the probability of getting that keyword is slim. On the other hand, you may sell a particular brand and style of bicycles. If you sell Trek mountainbikes, it will be much easier to get that keyword. Although, the traffic will be far less, the customers you do receive will all be looking for your specific product. Optimizing is a necessity to any website selling a product or a service.

Search Submission: While your site is being optimized, it needs to be submitted to the search engine for indexing. Do this wrong, and your site will be penalized and never reach a top ranking. The listings need to be continually monitored to insure they maintain their rankings. Search engines periodically change the algorithms used to analyze pages. So one day you can be at the top, and then the next you are not. Most search engines require a fee for inclusion ranging anywhere from $15 to $199.

Link Popularity: Many search engines rely in part on a website’s link popularity to establish ranking. Link popularity is how many other sites are linked to your site. Therefore, established sites will rank higher than new sites. Building your link popularity is very important for high search engine rankings.

Directories: Directories differ from search engines because they are reviewed and listed by human editors. The most popular directory Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) requires an annual fee of $299. With the proper submission, this investment can go a long way. Other important directories include Looksmart (www.looksmart.com) and the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.com).

Pay Per Click: Recently pay-per-click search engines have become very important. These search engines allow you to bid in real-time the amount you wish to pay for each visitor that clicks through. So you may battle your competition for the sponsored listings. This is important, because the top three bids show up on many other search engines and directories across the Internet. So, using the previous example of “bicycles,” if you make the top bid for “Trek mountainbikes” at Overture (www.overture.com), you will instantly appear as a sponsored listing at Yahoo (www.yahoo.com). This traffic can be expensive, depending on the competition for that keyword, but there are several benefits to the pay-per-click method. One is that your site does not need to be optimized for this to work, and the best thing is that you can have high numbers of visitors in a matter of days.

Cost-Effective Marketing:To achieve a cost-effective campaign, you will need a combination of search engine optimizing, directory submissions and a pay-per-click effort. In the beginning, your site will suffer from low-link popularity. So the only way to get traffic may be to use the pay-per-click system. But, again, this traffic is more expensive than listings in the directories and search engines.

In conclusion, you can now see that online marketing is a complex system with strict guidelines. The only way to succeed is to have a comprehensive, well-planed attack. For more information, or to have your site analyzed,